France weighs axing 2 holidays

France's prime minister warned on Tuesday that the country faced a Greek-scale financial crisis if it doesn’t act decisively to rein in its ballooning debt and deficit. He proposed a series of drastic measures to mend the nation’s budget, including scrapping two national holidays.

- LIZ ALDERMAN

In a sobering speech to lawmakers and members of President Emmanuel Macron’s Cabinet, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said France's debt had risen higher than that of almost every other country in Europe, reaching 114% of gross domestic product. Bringing it down in the coming years will require freezing nonmilitary spending and encouraging the French to “work more.”

“It's the last stop before the cliff, before we are crushed by the debt,’ Mr Bayrou said.

President Donald Trump's threat to impose 30% tariffs on European Union goods poses an additional risk to the French and European economies, he added.

Mr Bayrou’s spending cuts would include not replacing one out of three civil servants when they retired and eliminating “unproductive” state agencies, He would also scale back France’s subsidies for prescription medicine, saying the French “consume twice as many antibiotics as the Germans.”

The measure most likely to rankle the French was a proposal to scrap two national holidays: Easter Monday and May 8, which commemorates the end of the World War II in Europe and is often used as a “bridge” by the French to take a four-day weekend in the middle of spring.